TIME FOR RECRIMINATIONS? After the memorials, the investigations.

Acknowledging the Feb. 14 shootings raise issues beyond the scope of the current police investigation, Northern Illinois University officials this week will consider creating a task force to review how the campus responded that day.

Cherilyn Murer, chair of the NIU Board of Trustees, told the Tribune she plans to ask President John Peters to appoint a special panel when the board meets Thursday. Officials also must debate whether gunman Steven Kazmierczak's mental health record should be more thoroughly reviewed to see if it contained warning signs, she said.

There are opportunities for both the university and the public to reconsider their policies.

"This is an issue that is a national issue, and I think we should look beyond the four walls of our university," Murer said.

In any such conversation, there will be tradeoffs.

Analyzing the campus' much-lauded response to the emergency will be an easier task than pinning down how institutions responded to the mental health issues Kazmierczak had struggled with since high school.

Authorities have confirmed the shooter had stopped taking mood-stabilizing drugs in the weeks leading up to the killings, but they have not publicly addressed a troubling psychiatric history that included an abrupt Army discharge, a proclivity for self-injury and a year in a group home.

"I think that's a long discussion," Murer said. "You've got issues of privacy and human rights, and you've got issues of the greater public safety."

That only scratches the surface. There is much more for this task force, and other policymakers, and the public, to consider.

Murer, however, suggested the investigation's scope should be widened after the Tribune questioned whether the current inquiry was broad enough to address public concerns about violence and mental illness on college campuses.

Her comments come as law-enforcement officials acknowledge there is no timetable for the investigation's completion. Once Kazmierczak killed himself, the pressure and expediency that comes with arresting and prosecuting the killer evaporated.

Perhaps that conclusion follows if one limits the investigation to clearing the crime. There is, however, still reason to consider what the evidence says about the academic culture, at Northern Illinois specifically, and within higher education generally.

Authorities have been mum on Kazmierczak's mental state or any unheeded warning signs. The Tribune has spoken with dozens of the gunman's relatives, childhood friends, professors, neighbors, fellow students and associates since the shootings. Those willing to talk have helped paint a complex portrait of the graduate student, but many acknowledged they were withholding specific information at the request of either Kazmierczak's family or school officials.

Family members were sympathetic to the public's hunger for answers, but said they did not want to upset Kazmierczak's father, Robert, or his sister, Susan. Indeed, his godfather said the family refused to give him details about any funeral plans after he spoke to the media.

Officials at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Kazmierczak had been working toward a master's degree in social work, have refused to discuss his academic performance or behavior on campus. Professors and students who knew Kazmierczak say high-ranking faculty members have warned them against speaking to the media.

Campus officials have no plans to conduct an internal review to determine if any warning signs were missed, a U. of I. spokeswoman said.

Still, information about Kazmierczak's struggle with mental illness has trickled out. Friends say he took Lithium, a drug often used to treat bipolar disorder, in high school. After graduation, he lived for roughly a year in a Thresholds psychiatric group home in Chicago, where his therapists worked to help him find steady employment and get him to take his medication, house manager Louise Gbadamashi said.

While in the group home, Kazmierczak became a "cutter," a term used to describe people who intentionally hurts themselves, Gbadamashi said.He never showed a propensity for violence during his time at Thresholds, Gbadamashi said. Rather, when he became upset, he would avoid eye contact, buy video games and threaten to return home.

Circle the wagons! We can't have people asking questions about whether the university's vaunted inclusiveness makes campuses more dangerous. We also can't have anybody raising questions about privacy and disability-rights rules, as Virginia Tech's investigation discovers.

The Virginia Tech report questioned whether privacy laws prevented the university from giving Cho proper psychological assistance, a move the report suggests could have thwarted the 2007 killing spree. Gbadamashi wonders the same thing about Kazmierczak's deadly rampage.

The day before our shooting, I took issue with a Virginia Tech diversity statement that paid more attention to affirming "socially constructed" notions of difference, rather than recommending a "tougher policy toward loonies", to quote my post. At the time, I suggested a different stance, including a second look at both our privacy and disability-rights laws as matters of public policy, and at a nonjudgemental stance in the academy that borders on making a virtue out of extreme difference, might be more effective. There is nothing in the investigation of our own shooting that persuades me to think differently today.